Breaking down financial data: Investment Scorecards

To help investors understand the funds and equities available to them, Financial Engines provided an Investment Scorecard for each of them.
This provided added value in two ways:

Financial Engines had access to data about all funds offered in the customer's 401(k) plan, including private funds

Financial Engines broke down the complex financial information in ways that the average consumer can understand

This was a side project that I did together with a visual designer. A finance director helped us with the investment aspects.
I led the project, wrote the content, performed user research, and, of course, designed the interactions. Because this
was a side project, we decided to maximize chances of actually launching something by repackaging the information contained
in the existing Scorecard in ways that better served customers and Financial Engines. That worked and our Scorecards went live
in 2015.

Prior Art

My first step was to inventory the existing Scorecard and perform user research on it. The existing Scorecard
was designed in the 90s. As far as I could tell, no research had been performed then. In fact, some elements were
so incomprehensible that even non-financial stakeholders inside the company had trouble understanding them.

Here's a content inventory of the existing Scorecard. The first column shows the information hierarchy in the 90s
Scorecard, with 1 being the most important. The second column is my proposed information hierarchy, using the same scale.
The Headline and Information columns highlight where the headlines and the content are out of sync. The Notes column is
editorial by me. I created this inventory as a basis for discussion when meeting with our financial consultant about
the relative prominence of different types of information.

Because this project was all about helping less savvy investors understand their choices, my research focused
almost exclusively on comprehension. I conducted several rounds of
unfacilitated research through UserTesting.com and Survey Monkey. Here's one of the preview screens from Survey Monkey,
asking a comprehension question about the peer ranking element in the 90s Scorecard. I instructed participants on UserTesting.com
to talk out loud as they typed. It was very helpful to hear people reason out their answers. We knew from previous research
that customers engage quite closely with these pages. So in this particular case, prompting users to look at individual
page elements and tell us what they mean is realistic.